Currently, health information exchanges (HIEs) facilitate the exchange of healthcare information associated with patients across various organizations within regions, communities or healthcare systems. The healthcare information may be associated with multiple patient records across an HIE. At present, there may be many instances of patient health records relating to a same patient across an HIE. These records may have different identifiers assigned by different assigning authorities such as healthcare systems and in many instances these records may have slightly different demographic data associated with a same patient. The different identifiers and different demographic data associated with patients may create difficulties in retrieving health information about a patient(s).
Further complicating matters is that sometimes two different patients may have the same or similar demographic information. As such, existing record locator search techniques using standard demographic information may not return all of the healthcare information associated with a patient due to discrepancies in demographic from different systems. Another drawback of existing record locator search techniques using standard demographic information is that these techniques may return false positives as being unable to match enough demographic data with a corresponding patient.
Existing record locator search techniques typically attempt to query health information exchange systems for patient records using standard demographic information such as first name, last name, date of birth, gender, or address information of a patient. A problem with this approach is that in many instances too many partial matches occur due to slight discrepancies between the data of multiple systems associated with a patient or false positives may occur because of erroneous matches of patient information across a large number of patients.
Additionally, some existing record locator search techniques attempt to further refine the queries by adding information such as driver license numbers, phone numbers, or social security numbers of patients in order to utilize this information to retrieve health information (e.g., patient health records) associated with corresponding patients. A problem with this approach is that many healthcare systems participating in health information exchange are unable to obtain this information from their patients. As such, in many instances this additional information may not be utilized in search for health information of patients.
For example, one healthcare system such as a clinic may obtain patient identification information such as a driver license number of a patient upon the patient registering with the clinic. However, two other health care systems such as two other clinics may not obtain the driver license number of the same patient when the patient registers with the two clinics during separate patient visits. As such, existing record locator search techniques may be unable to utilize the driver license number of the patient to identify the patient and to identify health information related to the patient.
In view of the foregoing drawbacks, it may be beneficial to provide an efficient and reliable mechanism for accessing and retrieving health information associated with one or more patients.